skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the important part of the article was that he was encouraging the simplest solution to interface needs. In this regard I totally agree with him. I think some of the stuff they've added to consumer products has fallen into a weird modular development space.

"Oh, you want us to add a touch responsive display to a refrigerator rather than using mechanical buttons?"

Then they throw the kitchen sink at it. Once you've installed that touch screen and the hardware needed to control it, you might as well add the ability to control ice cube production from a mobile app. Since you're already there, you might as well give them the ability to Tweet that they just pulled a slice of double-chocolate cake out of the fridge.

Just because these components are capable of acting as small computing devices doesn't mean they should be utilized like one.

The entire time I'm reading the article I'm cringing too. I don't want a device that just operates as a universal key for everything I do during my day. I walk up, order a sandwich and they charge my account without any physical transaction happening and no passcode required to open my phone? What's to stop someone else from doing the same thing?

A car that opens it doors and starts its engines because I have a phone in my pocket? Same issue.

Steal someone's phone and you steal the keys to their life then (really easily).
Article for people who can't watch video at work: http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/fully-functional-android...
He's suggestion creating better thumbnails for the issue, instead of just shrinking the cover. The icon for MS Word is not a scaled-down picture of the box; you don't create a banner ad for your website by taking a screenshot of the site.

There's no reason the thumbnail for a comic has to be a scaled-down version of the optimized-for-print-and-shelf-space cover.

I'm thinking something like the right-hand thumbs on this page:
http://www.comixology.com/DC-Comics-Digital-Sneak-Peeks-10-3...
free(DennisRitchie); /* If ptr is a null pointer, no action occurs. */
Used cars depreciate very slowly on average (if something expensive breaks you are SOL though).

New cars lose a lot of value the moment you buy them, and then start to follow the used-car curve.

Everyday cars with a reputation for reliability lose their value very slowly. Luxury cars lose their value very quickly at first, but then slow down a lot.

Buying and selling to/from private parties saves a lot of money, but adds a lot of hassle.
The thing that really turned me off first were the classnames for the grid (one column example):

Foundation: .one.column
Skeleton: .one.column
Bootstrap: .span1

Then there are various other non-semantic classes: .btn, .pull-left, etc. It seems to me very much a toolkit built with a developer's mind ... in mind.

I like crafting my css by hand, making it easy to read and understand and above all - easy for me to remember so I don't have to crawl through documentation trying to remember if this element is .span4 .span-4 .span_4 or some other permutation I can't remember. I can easily remember .one.column. Its a column and its one.
Scrolling through all the comments, I find that it is impossible to not encounter cynicism - e.g. Apple is trying to divert from the Maps folly etc. - in this forum.

This is Apple paying respect and taking a moment to reminisce about Steve ... it's just a nice, human thing to do.
Entertainment Weekly Mag Has A Smartphone Bound In 1000 Issues
Machine learning used to predict trust/will decisions of deceased
Is Twitter breaking its own new display guidelines with TweetDeck?
Twitter’s new rules for how third parties must display tweets don’t extend to its own TweetDeck client, it would seem.
This reminds of a good friend. He got a job making six figures at Google straight out of college, and then lived in his van--in the Google parking lot--while saving every penny he earned. He took showers on campus and only ate free Google food. After a few years, he went into a mini-retirement and devoted his time to traveling around the world and volunteering.
Seven Creative Uses for Google Street View
Google Chrome: Optimization Guide
It seems to me that a water reservoir with a tube going near the engine (for heating) and a small water pump, coupled with an inflatable bathtub could solve the shower problem.

I've never lived in a van, but my family used to go camping and we used a similar system (inflatable bathtub inside the tent) so that my younger brother could take a bath even if it was too cold outside for him.
An older treatment of the problem, which I personally find to be clearer:

Kernighan, M., Church, K., Gale, W (1990) “A Spelling Correction Program Based on a Noisy Channel Model,” Coling, Helsinki , Finland.
http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/C/C90/C90-2036.pdf
>What are your sources for this?

Lots. E.g

"""Today, Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Facebook’s mobile strategy relied too much on HTML5, rather than native applications. (...) According to Zuckerberg, people are consuming twice as many feed stories since the update to the new iOS app, which is great.""'

>I just googled it, and the first thing that came up is this - "Twice as Many Mobile News Readers Prefer Browsers to Apps [STUDY]"

This is not really relevant. It amounts to "people use their mobile web browser a lot", which is obvious. For one, tons of sites don't have a native app version to start with, so people read them on their mobile browser.

The relevant comparison would be between two cases of the SAME service, e.g NYT native app vs NYT website on mobile.

And it would be even more relevant if we were talking not merely for news sites (which are simple, and can work equally well on the browser), but for more involved apps.

How many people used the Mail app for Gmail vs going to Gmail on the browser? How many people used twitter clients vs going to twitter.com on the browser? Those are the comparisons that matter.
Unless they just leave it parked, they are unlikely to recoup the cost of maintaining it over that time:

http://www.secretentourage.com/lifestyle/autos/cost-of-owner...

I was bit by this in my early 20s when I bought a really nice BMW, I hadn't considered that dealer servicing would end up costing so much.

But I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.
seems that everytime that there is a comparison between Ruby and PHP, it turns to a personal fight
Not quite a van or RV, but I have always found the tiny house movement interesting.

http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/

Many of them are small enough that you can legally tow them anywhere.
Someone made this comment on Techcrunch and it sums up the impact of Ritchie's work:

Without Ritchie, we would not have iOS for the iPhones, the Mac operating system and no basis for Java within the Android phones. No basis for Python and Ruby since they are written in C. Linux stood on the shoulders of Unix, just as Steve Jobs/Apple stood on the shoulder of many giants and this man was one of those giants. We lost a great tech leader. His impact was huge!, as billions of dollars was made releasing products that benefit from his work but he wasn't a billionaire, but impact is more than money.
Spotify Posted Net Loss of $59 Million in 2011
Evaluating Significance – Designing a Marketing Experiment
I think the author of the article was conflating "interface" with "GUI".

Yeah, absolutely. Don't put a GUI as part of my car controls; that's stupid. But the wheel, pedals and shifter are certainly an interface.
How is it simpler?

- owner's keyfob transmits signal to car

- owner's car polls for incoming signal

- owner's car decrypts keyfob signal

- owner's car verifies that the keyfob has a legitimate encrypted key for that vehicle

- owner's vehicle signals the locking routine in the ECU

- owner's ecu flips solenoid for only the drivers side door

- door unlocks

All the above steps are done without the owner having to know about it.

I'm quite sure he is talking human->computer interfaces not computer->computer interfaces.

By your logic, it's simpler to buy something from someone in another country with cash than it is to use PayPal.
Airline baggage tags: Brilliant design gets bags from Point A to Point B
Assuming the point is that we focus too much on big personality rather than actual contribution, this is something that bugs me and I think about often. Ken Thompson is still around. So is Bjarne Stroustrup. Linus Torvalds is still heading the linux project. We need to celebrate these people. There are a ton of them and even as an enthusiast, I don't know who they all are and I'm ashamed. Most regular people haven't even heard these names and probably don't care to. Hell Stallman probably deserves a nobel prize for GNU.
This seems like a romantically bohemian way to approximate a pampered middle class kid's idea of how poor people live. If you want to save money, you can try what they actually do, which is move to a less desirable neighborhood and spend one third what you do on rent for an apartment.

You live in a crazy expensive neck of the woods? Nice to meet you; I live in Japan, cry me a river. There's old folks on social security and single mothers in your town. Most of them don't shower with wet wipes.

I can't tell if my revulsion for this idea is class disdain because I'm too well off to consider it or class disdain because when I wasn't well off we had too much pride to ever stoop to anything like that.
I totally 100% agree with you, but the counterargument would be that people are very unhappy when they go to download a new game and it doesn't run on their phone or it runs badly.
The (total) magnitude is just a convenient scale to measure of how much light that is radiated/reflected on an object. If the light was radiated equally in all directions, the light (all photons) would after a time have travelled equally far, defining a sphere. Since the photons travel further away every second, the surface area on the sphere increases as r^2 (r=distance to object), but the number of photons is the same.
That means that the light density, or the number of photons that hit our eyes/cameras, will decrease with the same factor, r^2. That's why they created the apparent magnitude. The (total) magnitude is a measure of how much light that leaves the object, while the apparent magnitude tells us how much light will hit the earth, or equivalently: how bright will this object appear on the earth.
Not receiving data on my end - here is the cached page:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blog.pr...
If other HNers are like me, this might explain it: I'm not a big fan of Apple. And lately I think they've become the "Big Brother" they were fighting in the 1984 commercial. However, I'm a huge Steve Jobs fan. He's right up there with Henry Ford and Fred Harvey on my list.

Just watch this little clip and you can see why I like one and not the other: http://www.wimp.com/stevemoment/
Except $20k per month is a pretty low threshold for "big hits". We were making significantly more than that in the Palm/WinMo hey days and weren't the exception to the rule.
The Power Symbol
No, it is defInitely not possible. If it were, you could do it over and over again and compress any file down to an arbitrarily small size. Two things to search for are "pigeonhole principle" and "kolmogerov complexity."

Essentially the problem is that any encoding of a string either preserves the length of all possible inputs, or shortens some inputs and lengthens others, or lengthens all inputs. There is no encoding that shortens all strings because of the pigeonhole principle. To apply this to the challenge, see that the challenge is to encode the string as a program that when executed produces the string. Just because the encoding language is Turing complete does not mean that it can evade the pigeonhole principle.
The Great American History Puzzle
"Random noise is practically non-compressible."

It has to be actually random though. I was hoping the solution to this would be that Patrick had figured out that Mike used a specific random number generation engine with a specific seed and thus his decompressor was just a reversed engineered version of the original data generator and the file it "decompressed" was 0 bytes long.
That's not what the term means, though I accept that companies may be sleazily using the term this way.
The biggest risk here would surely be that around PID (Patient Identifiable Data). Who is responsible for ensuring the safety of this data?

As it is right now, it's ultimately the trusts themselves (as is my understanding), but what safeguards will there (or could there) be in place to keep this data safe.

And what about that data? Do we force any new staff-written applications to create their own MPI etc. or do we let them access the main systems through some kind of API? In which case, that would need creating - and interfacing to a variety of different software is never simple. If it's all to stay on the internal network, then who hosts these apps - and where does that budget come from?

There are a lot of big questions and potential risks here and I'd be very interested to see what these eye-catching initiatives turn out to be. Until I see evidence to the contrary, I remain pessimistic about these being anything but trivial and largely pointless.

If this was a serious effort, why ask the doctors, nurses and other clinical staff to learn to code - and not reach out to the open-source development community and ask them for their help. I'm sure a great many developers have, or know someone, who has used the NHS and would love to have a part in making things better.
My favorite is this RV built by 3 Japanese students:

http://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-product-design/tiny-tr...

More details:

http://www1.ttcn.ne.jp/~gyo/English/index.htm
We've had some great stuff recently, if you think about it.

Comets: Hyakutake was easily visible, Hale-Bopp was outstanding, and Shoemaker–Levy 9 _ran into_ Jupiter, leaving damage that was visible to small hobby telescopes.

Manmade: Back when Mir was still in orbit, at times you could see the shuttle chase it down. ISS is fairly bright and fun to watch. If you do a little planning, Iridium flares can be very bright for a minute or so. Go to http://www.heavens-above.com/, and look for upcoming flares at your latitude and longitude.
Obligatory Chris Farley: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nhgfjrKi0o
Yes, you would find some matches with an exhaustive search, but they'd be pretty small and now you have to encode the path to get those bytes back in a form that is smaller than the byte run that matches. And good luck with that.
Super Skyrim Bros. Mod is Elder Scrolls on Mushrooms
Although 'terrawatts' is a rather charming play on the word, considering the context...
Your link to the rules of Nim is down. (http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/home.pacbell.net/fran...)
The kinds of static analysis you're talking about are different than what Matt is talking about in his article.

Matt is talking about situations where you can make guarantees. That is, if his analyzer says that a register can never take on a negative value, that is a guarantee. It is not based on a heuristic, it is based on a proof. How this guarantee is possible, despite the halting problem, is because he designs an abstract representation of the program being analyzed. It loses a lot of information, but by using it, one can actually prove things about the program.

If I understand you correctly, you're talking about heuristics which allow one to say "It is very likely that this program will exhibit that behavior." It's not a guarantee, because it's not based on a proof, but rather on heuristics which try to match patterns in the code in question to patterns in code that was known to exhibit such behavior. Carmack talks about using such static analysis in his projects in a popular blog post (HN discussions: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4543553 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3388290).

In simpler terms, Matt's approach avoids the halting problem by only providing guarantees on a limited set of behaviors. The approach you're talking about avoids the halting problem by not providing guarantees, but by providing likelihoods.
This brought a huge grin to my face. I think I'll be smiling for the rest of the day, just thinking about it. It's wonderful to see people tinker and explo(r|d)e stuff!
This is just a fantastic series of programs. Think number 2 of the 4 is the best. http://vimeo.com/29875053 The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts
Barrett Brown charged with Internet threats, retaliation, conspiracy charges
Invite HN: Tagxt.com Open Beta Weekend (HackerNews Only)
hi HN! it's probly way early to make this public but i'm going a little untraditional on this one.

check this out: http://www.tagxt.com/post/1
> when he threatened to accuse Patrick of fraud

Exactly. He was the one committing the fraud.

To quote Mike Goldman (fta):
"I cannot fathom that someone would read the comp.compression faq first and then want to participate after understanding the futility of the effort. On the other hand, some people just don't understand information theory too well."

He took $100 from this guy knowing he was frauding him! It was like watching a game of nerd 3-card monte.
This article was very useful for me once. I used a similar approach to normalize a database of search terms ('tags') for a big site.
They do just leave it parked.

Exceptionally rich people who buy Lamborghini and other exotic cars usually have several or even dozens of them. For the most part, they just sit in the garage.
Could Your API Land You in Court: What Developers Should Know
I look forward to a future where many natural interactions are improved through computer augmentation. Unfortunately, for the vast majority of today's computing interactions, you need some way of conveying more information than what is naturally present.

In any well-designed interaction it needs to be clear what you (the user) can do, and what the state of the system you're interacting with is. 'No UI' only works when you're augmenting a system where these two things are already clear. For instance, in the case of the car door system, you already know that you can open the car with your key, and you can tell when the car door unlocks.

When I open a new app for the first time, I don't already know everything it can do. I need to see the interface to know what's possible. And I need to see feedback to know that I'm making progress.

I've heard that many Nest owners are actually a bit disappointed in its smart features, as there's no way to tell why it's doing the things it's doing (why did it just make it cold in here?) Without a way of communicating its reasoning, people are suspicious of its "father knows best" recommendations. Even Amazon tells you roughly why it's recommending something to you.

And Voice UIs don't count as no UI. In fact, they're often a very poor interface, as they convey information much more slowly and invasively than a visual interface, and there's no a priori way to know what voice commands a system accepts.
I wonder what the probability that a files is not compressible is.

Even more, I wonder if the likelihood that a file is compressible increases, decreases, or is constant with relation to file size.

My assumption would be that 50% of files are not compressible at a given size, and that compressibility doesn't vary with file size.
But in many cases, you can eliminate the human-machine interaction itself. Machines can work in the backend, without you having to interact with them.

When I enter a shop and a ringer alerts the shopkeeper of my presence, I never had to interact with the machine at all - it just sensed me and acted in the background.
How to make many-to-many mapping in java with Hibernate
printf is not statically typed. That's the problem. What's the type of printf? it's int printf(const char *,...)

The "..." part means that the function has to figure out what the types of all the arguments are. printf accomplishes this by, at runtime, parsing the string format and deciding what types to use.

Contrast with a string representation function from a language like Haskell: show::(Show a) => a -> String

No matter what argument is provided to the function show, as long as it observes the type constraint (Show a), a sensible result will be returned. Since it is known at compile time whether the argument observes the class constraint, there's never a surprise that value is printed incorrectly.
Another way to debug web pages with the inspector is to use the iOS 5 emulator with http://www.iwebinspector.com/
I cannot believe that the Mini shows Twitter updates on the speedometer. That is terrifying.
Previous discussions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10967 (2005 days ago!)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42587

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=665544

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2034981
TCP is ok, but it has a lot of flaws with handshaking and long lag, and also is useless for things like gaming because it can't go through NAT (NAT itself is a disaster too). TCP has created an internet of second class citizens who can only download but can't upload. The worst thing is, IPv6 will repeat all the same mistakes, so I think of it as second class citizen 2.0.

If it were up to me, I would scrap the whole thing, especially the needlessly large UDP and TCP headers, and make a simpler scheme that only contains the destination IP address and maybe a small key that references metadata held in each endpoint's internal state. So the TCP protocol would only exist in each endpoint's TCP stack, not on the wire.

I don't really have any sources, but I lost two years of my life trying to write a windowed reliable transmission scheme over UDP that can punch through firewalls, basically what WebRTC is trying to do, and got thoroughly disillusioned with networking. It just never, ever, ever works 100% reliably, so you end up recreating the work that Skype did if you want a connection as reliable as TCP. I think that says a lot about the miserable state of networking today. I might get down voted for this, but I feel that what I've said is a statement of fact if you look at the hoops that P2P protocols have to go through today. That mess was never the intention of the original network architects (except for admins maintaining corporate firewalls who want their users to be second class citizens, who sadly had a hand in the NAT used in home broadband modems).
Type Script Language Features – Classes, Inheritance & Overriding
The Noisy Neighbor Problem: Why AWS is bad for small organizations and users
* Not using the HTML5 Video Tag
An Introduction to Traveling in Europe
I would think the threat of Windows moving to ARM is much bigger. Microsoft already announce an ARM version of Windows 8, and there is more revenue to lose there for Intel.

However, I doubt Intel will start pushing Linux in response. The strategy of building more power efficient x86 CPUs seems more logical.
I can't reproduce any error there. Perhaps they fixed it?
Regarding the topic of internet access, I wonder how many van dwellers resort to piggybacking on nearby homeowners' unsecured wifi networks? Seems like if you're trying to minimize costs, rolling up alongside an open network is a great way to get your Hulu and Netflix without going over your data limits.
Similar thoughts here. Still don't quite understand why the brits like their tea with milk.
He's talking about a mobile site that was using a public API. They had no more access to the password database than you or I do.
$5 says it ends up something like this:

http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/The_Homer

Seriously though, I'm not sure if the future megacities will really have many cars, at least not the personal vehicle variety.

I'm sure BMW is looking for ideas, but IMO the solution is outside of the box they're willing to work within (i.e., private car ownership that is substantially similar to what we have today).